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On Friday, July 25, 2014, our Chegg interns, along with our Intern Program Manager, Lora Kyle, Chief Technical Officer, Chuck Geiger, Chief Marketing Officer, Esther Lem, and the Chegg for Good team battled temperatures of more than 100°F to give back to the community by mulching, weeding and seeding at Full Circle Farm. Full Circle Farm is a local project of Sustainable Community Gardens (SCG), a community-based nonprofit dedicated to the renewal of local, sustainable food systems. For more information, please visit their website at: http://fullcirclesunnyvale.org.

Here is our volunteer group before they got down and dirty!

Our volunteer group after all of their hard work! Thank you Cheggsters for giving back to the community! We really appreciate your contribution to #OrangeSummer!

Fun Fact: Many dishes in her house are pottery she made in high school and college

“The marketing team was a great place for me to learn a lot because it enabled me to work for a lot of different channel leads on a variety of projects. I knew that coming on as a full-time employee at Chegg would mean that I would have great mentorship and would also give me a chance to really contribute to what the team was working on.”

Why did you decide to come to Chegg?As an intern, I decided to come to Chegg because as a college brand, I thought would be really cool to see the business side of selling to a student. During my time at Colgate University, I had been doing marketing internships, which led me to an interest in consumer marketing, which at Chegg means being able to see how the students talk about the brand every day. The marketing team was a great place for me to learn a lot because it enabled me to work for a lot of different channel leads on a variety of projects. I knew that coming on as a full-time employee at Chegg would mean that I would have great mentorship and would also give me a chance to really contribute to what the team was working on.

How did you get into your field?

I think the career services internship I participated in while attending Colgate University were a huge portion of figuring out what I wanted to do. Being constantly surrounded by tech and growing up in the Bay Area, I knew that I wanted to work in a fast-paced start up doing something that was really interesting to me, but I didn’t want to go back to school for the job I wanted. Environmental Sciences, which is what I majored in, along with Psychology, is this cool intersection of learning about people’s interaction with the environment and the environment’s effect on human behavior. This folds into my career since consumer behavior is all about people’s perception and perspective on the world, which really enables me to get into people’s heads and think about what’s going to make them do this or that, buy this thing, or click on that. The tech space focuses on the consumer first and foremost, where we have product and design teams built around the user’s experience, but from a marketing standpoint, it’s constantly grounding yourself and thinking “What is someone going to think when they see this and why are they going to listen to us?”. This enables us to constantly put the student first instead of dictating what I think they would, or should, like. And people are always saying “Oh, I bet you have a lot of students there”. Well, we do have students in the office and we like to listen to them, but you don’t have to be the consumer to get in their head. For us, I think it’s a fun exercise to constantly push ourselves to be in the student mindset and to be relevant to students.

What are you proud of?

My little win is the #cheggmeout hashtag back in the day as an intern. We came up with the idea to do a contest during textbook rush, where people won money for putting a picture of their Chegg box on social media. That was a “Yes! We made it!” moment because a lot of things we came up with as interns were like “That’s a great idea! We really love that. Maybe we’ll use that” and that was one of the things they actually used!

As a full-time employee, I’m most proud of the Chegg mobile app launch last August since I worked on the marketing launch around the new app. That was my first major project and definitely one of the biggest that I’ve done as a full-time employee. I worked with a lot of different people to pull it off.

The Chegg mobile app was important because it was the first time we launched multiple products within the app. It’s not the entire site; it will be there someday, but it was the first time we had textbook rentals, the eReader, textbook solutions, and Q&A all in the same place. It was also the first time we, as a company, were really thinking about students coming to us on their phone. In the past, we had done it as a side project in a sense, it finally became a focus where it even made the top 10 business priorities for the company at the time. It was definitely a time in which I learned a lot about mobile marketing and also, got the rest of the marketing team thinking about what mobile means. The mobile app has continued to be part of my job, but I think the launch itself I was most proud of.

What have you been working on lately?

As a Product Marketing Associate, I work on marketing launches for new products. Most recently, I ran our marketing launch for the Chegg Career Center, which we launched in late May and we’ll be ramping up all throughout the summer and early fall for continuing excitement around Career Center and what Chegg has to say in the career space.

Career Center is comprised of internships, entry-level jobs, and career profiles. You navigate to those career profiles by setting filters of what you’re interested in and once you get to one of those career pages, you can find internships and entry-level jobs that are suited to that career, which is pretty cool.

It’s really an exciting space to be in, especially having just graduated and knowing what it’s like to try and find a job out there. I have a lot of friends where that’s their mindset right now, so this will be perfect for them! Also, by continuing the conversation with a lot of college students about why internships are important, why they should be thinking about what career they want, and how they should figure out what career they want, we are addressing problems that really need to be solved.

Has anything surprised you about working here?

I’m surprised by the number of people that are constantly joining Chegg! Of course, there are always roles to fill and being filled every day, but it’s amazing the number of new faces that are starting every week in the Chegg office, especially in the summertime when we have 25+ interns joining. It just means that Chegg is constantly growing and improvingsince our new additions give us new perspective on things we have already done and are hoping to improve.

What excites you most about Chegg’s future?

In the framework of “We put students first”, this new mission of improving student outcomes is really exciting since the focus is on getting results for students. We can do that in their academic lives, in their career interests, outside of the classroom, and we can do that for high schoolers as well. The story is really coming together and it really helps us as a company–from product, marketing, and business, everyone’s standpoint of knowing why we’re doing the things we are doing and really writing a cohesive story for our user. 2014 is really exciting because it’s the first time we are realizing the dream of the Student Hub. We’ve been talking about the Student Hub since at least 2012, maybe earlier, and it takes a long time for a vision like that to come to fruition and I think we’re finally getting there.

What advice do you have for someone who wants to start in a role like this at Chegg?

In a product marketing role at Chegg, it’s really important to build relationships with people in the company because it really takes a collaborative effort to pull off a marketing launch. Anything I’m working on, I’m usually working with 10-15 people and that’s a really fun thing to do, but really hard if you don’t know the people very well and you’re trying to ask them for stuff all of the time. When I first started at Chegg, it was a lot of asking people questions about how things worked and making sure that they knew I felt like they were of value. It’s surprising how few people do that after the first few weeks. It’s really a constant exercise of getting to know people better and getting to know what’s going on in their roles, and in their lives. You can get really busy and caught up in your own work and it’s so surprising to me still, how much it makes a difference to just touch base with someone and ask them how work is going, how life is going. For me, it helps me stay connected to people around the company and knowing “Oh, this release has changed! Now this is going to have a domino effect over here” and maybe somebody didn’t think to communicate to that side of the company. So I act a lot as a bridge.

For someone who wants to convert from an intern to a full-time employee, it’s important to make a great impression as an intern and also, to contribute every day. It was really great to be a college student at a college brand because you got to give your opinion and weigh in on things like how a college student would say this or how they would want to hear it from you. It’s very important to do this and learn how to have conversations with the people you report to. I got a lot of advice during my internship from inside and outside of the company, but I made a sincere effort to have an upfront conversation with my boss, saying “I’m interested in staying on part-time and I’d really love to keep interning for the team, if that will work. Are there any projects I can work on? Let’s see how it goes.” and keeping that conversation alive in terms of turning it into a full-time role by asking things like, “I’m thinking about working full-time at Chegg. Is there a position that would be available?” And it’s not just your direct boss either; it may be the person who leads your team because the person you report to isn’t always the one making the hiring decisions. I think as an intern, you see the world in a much smaller sphere, so if you don’t think about the bigger picture and learn about how your team functions beyond you and your boss, then you may be short-changing yourself in actually finding a full time role in the future.

About two times each week, a different Chegg employee participates in the Intern Speaker Series, where they talk to the interns about their experiences and career paths that led them to their current roles at Chegg. To date, we have had the following speak at our Intern Speaker Series:

Rob Chestnut – General Counsel

Usher Lieberman – VP, Communications

Anne Dwane – Chief Business Officer

Nathan Schultz – Chief Content Officer

Linda Sill and John Fabello – Sr. Recruiters

Senior Recruiters Linda Sill and John Fabello teaching interns how NOT to shake hands when you come in for an interview. A good, firm handshake is definitely the way to go, especially for #OrangeSummer!

The interns are able to “pick their brains” and ask as many questions as they feel needed within the hour long session so that they can gain insightful knowledge that they can apply to their own career paths one day.

On Tuesday, July 2nd, 2014, the Chegg Interns headed to San Francisco once again for the San Francisco Giants vs. St. Louis Cardinals game, but first, made a pit stop at Chegg’s San Francisco office, which is located right next to AT&T Park!

While at Chegg’s San Francisco office, the Chegg Interns were able to learn some words of wisdom from our VP, College Outreach, Bob Patterson, Business Operations Manager, Brand Partnerships, Katie Cartwright, and Marketing Lead, Sean Castillo

Once the Chegg Interns had familiarized themselves with our San Francisco office, they headed on over to AT&T park for the game.

Here, they were able to get an aerial view of the field, making sure they didn’t miss anything on the field.

On Friday, June 27, 2014, the Chegg Interns headed north to San Francisco, where they were able to get a tour of the city, as well as Alcatraz, in which they learned about the history of the island. Hooray for #OrangeSummer!